Making Outlook Work With Google Calendar

January 21, 2016 - 2 minutes read

Having problems making your Calendar and Contacts in Outlook sync with Google?

Google offers a great range of products at free or very affordable prices. Gmail is the defacto standard when it comes to email these days, and small businesses with their own domain can subscribe to Google Apps for Business from $5/user/month and have their full business collaboration platform powered by Google. But a complaint we hear frequently is “I can’t make the calendar and contacts in my Outlook Sync with Google, and from there to my mobile devices.”

It is actually possible, but it’s not easy or apparent.

If you’ve subscribed to the paid version of Google Apps for Business, it’s a simple matter of installing Google Apps Sync for Outlook on your desktop computer, and your Outlook data will be sync’d up to your Google-hosted calendar and contacts.

But what if you’re using a free Gmail account? (This also applies to those small business users who have a ‘legacy’ FREE Google Apps for Business account, because Google allowed you to keep your account but they disabled support for their Sync app on the free accounts.)

Fortunately, Google offer the ability to publish your calendar information using a protocol called CalDAV. Although there have been various reports of this also being limited/dropped/changed, at present you can simply add a plug-in like Gerhard Zehetbauer’s Outlook CalDav Synchronizer and it will take care of everything for you. The plugin works with Outlook 2016, 2013, 2010, and 2007. It’s a fairly simply setup, and you can do uni-directional or bidirectional syncing of your appointments and contacts between Outlook and Google’s servers.